home free....sort of

Sorry for the lack of posts. I don't really have an excuse though because ever since I left the hospital on Tuesday afternoon, my life has been relatively average. Here's a quick list of what I've been doing.

• Chilling in mad coffee shops all over this fair city. There was the Café Coffee Day in Connaught Place after I got kicked out of the British Library for having a backpack and refused to pay the Rs.650 membership fee to sit there for longer than 30 minutes. (Americans rebelled from the British once, and I can do it again.) The Costa Coffee by my apartment in Malviya Nagar has been getting a lot of action. I'm currently sitting in The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in Select CityWalk, which is pleasantly Americanized and air conditioned.

• Speaking of Select CityWalk, I saw "The Hunger Games" on Thursday evening. Couldn't tell if the movie actually is that choppy or if Indian censors just had their way with the movie. Either way, it was brilliant. No shame in admitting that I cried when Katniss volunteered for her sister and again when Rue was killed and again when they returned home.

• Because I'm in Delhi by myself, I've been a little bit starved for contact with other human beings. This has driven me to listen to podcasts obsessively. Lots of podcasts. I'm literally free basing NPR right now: "This American Life," "Planet Money" episodes from 2010, "Savage Love," "Radio Lab." The first thing I do when I get home is write a big (and I use "big" in the relative term since I am still a student and soon to be unemployed) check to NPR because these podcasts are saving my life right now. You should donate too because your favorite blogger is telling you to. It's the American thing to do.

• I've been eating mad peanut butter and honey sandwiches, since my "fragile American tummy" can't really handle anything else right now. It is what it is.

• But it hasn't all been Americanized. I went to a lecture at the Indian Trust for Art and Culture Heritage on World Heritage Day about "Cities and Political Power." It was incredibly interesting, and the lecturer was this great MIT professor and Indian urban planner Charles Correa. I think that I really do love urban planning. In fact, I think this might be what I want to do with my life (although this is a bold statement to make in a public forum). This is probably a good time to have this realization, considering I only have six months before I graduate from college.

• There's been a lot of sending of e-mails and conducting of interviews and writing of my ISP. I've got 20 pages down and ten left to write. It's really the home stretch, and my goal is to have thirty pages by this weekend because...

• I bought a plane ticket to Mumbai! This time next week, I expect to be sitting on a beach. It's been hard being in Delhi by myself. The city's lost a little bit of its luster since I've been here on my own and haven't been able to go out with friends. I'm excited to meet up with them in Mumbai; it'll be a good time.

That's about it. I'm anxious to get the next phase of this trip going. I feel like I'm furiously spinning my wheels right now, but I'm not going anywhere fast. It's frustrating, and being alone in a big, foreign city doesn't help. But talking with my boyfriend the other day, I realized that I need to give myself some more credit. This isn't an easy experience, especially given the fact that I've been in the hospital for four days. As my dad put it, "You've had enough sick days in the last few months to last a lifetime." I just need to breathe and make it through this next week, and then I'm home free.